Day 74: The Goblet is Two-Thirds Full, or Sunday Reflections on the View from Here

Dear readers,
As of this Friday I had completed 72 of the 108 consecutive posts I have charged myself with writing in "Winter with Zoe: Meditations on Love, Dogs, and Mortality."  The goblet is 2/3 full (plus a couple sips-worth.)  Whether you've just stumbled on this blog for the first time, or you've been here many times before, I'm so grateful to you for reading.

When my wicked sister, Mira Bartok (blame her!) suggested that I do my second round of 108-straight days of meditating and journal-writing in this public way, I wasn't sure if I could come up with enough material.  I love a good challenge, but on busy days my journal tends to look something like this:

went to vet's.  new meds for Zoe.  teaching was fine.  salmon for dinner.  dreamed i was about to get on row boat to India and my sister was beside me, wrapped in a blanket.  I had to protect her.  meditated for 20 minutes.  gym.

To write 108 mini-photo essays that don't just read like a rushed journal entry, but actually have a beginning, a middle, and an end, and something resembling an epiphany--i.e., something someone might want to read--is certainly a test, but I've really enjoyed the challenge.  To be honest, I love it.  Sometimes it's all I want to do.  My normal mode of writing is to hide in my corner for a few years perfecting the same sentences and then to show the fruits of my labors to my agent or send it out to a magazine and wait for a long time.  Then, if it is published, I don't always hear back from readers.  It's very exciting and fulfilling to send something out into the world early one morning and then realize later in the day that people have not only read it, but have comments to make. 

But the speed of the blog world is dizzying sometimes, especially for someone like me, who loves leisure and can't get enough of it.  Sometimes on rushed mornings I would post, then leave the house, and then realize that I'd made a type-o and would not be able to fix it for hours.  I was in the car en route to the dentist's when I pictured a sentence in which I had written "cramp-ons" instead of "clamp-ons" to describe what we all needed just then to navigate the icy sidewalks.  I often make Freudian slips; I was probably thinking of how our feet cramp up as we try to stay upright.  A post is easy to correct, but if you don't get to it right away, you've sent a mistake out into the world.  That's the nature of a genre for which speed and immediacy are its most salient features.

One big help has been the daily meditation.  I've written several posts about it, including an early one, Day Two: Meditation for Skeptics, Slouchers, Neurotic Planners, Caffeine Addicts, and for People who Think they are Too Busy to Meditate but Want to, Day 58: The Chew-Dog Mantra for Dog Lady Meditators, and Day 33: Monday Morning Music, and  Day 65: The Yoga of Sitting Upright.  I have found that when I begin the day with a mindfulness practice like meditation, everything else, including the writing, comes through with more clarity and purpose.

Doing this amount of writing in short daily bursts has been good for my other writing, which surprised me.  It sort of limbers me up, makes me more honest, and nimble, and I've found that the novel I started revising this winter has a fresher voice.  I'm more willing to take risks now; I'm not so careful.  And I've also learned to follow a great writing schedule that not only makes me get the pages written, day after day, but also helps me pace myself and guard my energy, which protects me from burn-out.

(Check out Day 56 : Gargoyles In Love: the Search of the Perfect Schedule, Part III)

When I began "Winter with Zoe," it was December, but there was still no snow on the ground.  We've had a very mild winter.  Yesterday a friend told me her dog had just been skunked, and that when she went to the animal hospital to buy Skunk-off, she was told that many dogs have been coming in this winter with porcupine quills as well.  Critters that should hibernate haven't.  I wonder if they are walking around feeling exhausted, wishing they could get a good winter's sleep, wondering what has happened to our planet.  Here in the North Country, we have had such freaky weather: rain, freezing rain, slush, then cold, that we've mostly had to navigate ice, not snow.  (And hence the need for "clamp-ons," which I have yet to buy.)  I've written a number of posts about learning to walk on ice with Zoe, and how her new status as a tripod has taught me a great deal about perseverance and grace.

(See Day 48: Mindful Winter Walking).

I've also learned to take better pictures, thanks to Tara Freeman, who gave me some lessons.  Buying a better camera also helped.  The Canon Rebel T3 is easy-to-use and although I haven't even begun to explore all of its capabilities, I've enjoyed having something new to learn and to find a new way of seeing, a new form of expression.

(See Day 63: Teaching These Two Old(ish) Dogs New Tricks.)

And as for the dog herself, the star of the hour, the dog who launched six dozen posts, she's doing well.  A few days before I started the blog, I had taken her to Ottawa for her fourth chemotherapy appointment.  We received the devastating news on that day that the cancer had spread to her lungs.  But in the two and a half months since that visit, she has fought back, with the help of the doxorubicin injections, and has kept things at bay.  From visit to visit, some tiny nodules would emerge, while others would disappear.  Except for two isolated days when she had no appetite, she has been vigorous and queenly, as usual, and is always eager for her two daily walks.  Most people who see her think she looks as healthy and vital as ever.

I think the posts I'm most glad to have written are the ones about her visits to Alta Vista Animal Hospital in Ottawa for chemotherapy and lung x-rays.  I thought these posts would be very painful to write, but sometimes they wrote themselves.  I am going to turn some of this into a book, and having the challenge of writing about these visits, which were all quite emotional for me, has helped me keep a good record of the story as it unfolds.  Zoe's oncologist and the two vet techs, Dr. Bravo, Willow, and Donna, are keeping Zoe alive, and the challenge of telling this story right in the moment, day after day, will make, I hope, the pages come alive.  Often when I write a memoir, I go back to events that took place decades ago.  Having a blog like this wrestles me to the page and makes me reflect on what is happening as it happens.  Those blog posts are, Day 15: (Minor) Miracle on Bank Street, Day 36: Still Life, with Dog, Day 57, The Purple Heart Meditation, and Day 59: The Heart of the Matter, a Two-Part Day.

Every day with Zoe, and every day keeping this blog, has made me look for small miracles and events that are story-worthy.  I notice more than I ever have.  I feel, as the poet Linda Gregg once wrote, that living with Zoe, then writing about her, is "like being alive twice."  Yesterday at midday I took some pictures of her outside in the back yard.  Much of the snow and ice had melted, and it felt like late March, not the middle of February, but Zoe didn't seem to mind.  She was a mysterious black dot in the landscape, from the distance, and then closer up she was my happy dog unearthing beef marrow bones she hid in the snow weeks ago.  I felt like the many weeks I've been engrossed in this project were happening all at once.

(See Day Nine: The Curious Case of the Hidden Beef Marrow Bone.)

What has surprised me most about these past 73 days is how happy I've been.  I expected this to be a much more somber time, but as I've said before, Zoe missed the memo that she's supposed to be worried about the future.  I look at her, at her curious and calm face, and all I can think about is how lucky I am to have this time to spend with her.

I have also found that "Winter with Zoe," if I had to categorize it, is a blog partly dedicated to travel-writing.  Not only have I found myself reliving memories of being with Zoe and my husband in France, and shared other stories from travels to India, but I've learned to see my own home community in the North Country as a place to travel to with the same wonder and imagination.

(See Day 52: Travels at Home, and Day 49: What the Dog Sees in Him.)

A backyard stroll can feel like a saunter into new country when I see the world through my dog's eyes.

Thank you so much for reading.  There's a lot more to come and I'm honored to be able to share it with you.

Wishing you all a relaxing Sunday,

Natalia

Day 73: On Resisting Sentimentality, Part Two

Zoe received a valentine last week from Sadie, my sister, Mira's, saucy little black dog.  It was a card of three adorable golden retriever puppies singing "I'm a believer" by the Monkees, except they replaced the word, "believer" with "retriever."  The pups thought love was only true in fairy tales, until they/Sadie had been converted after meeting Zoe. 

I still have the card on display in our living room.

Mira's birthday is coming up next week and I need to get her the perfect dog card today.  If I were a cartoonist, or knew my way around photo shop, I would make her one.  In anticipation of Mira's upcoming trip to New York City it would have Mira and Sadie in smocks painting at an easel a copy of a masterpiece from the Met.  I just found one on Google by Gustave Courbet, "Hunting Dogs with Dead Hare,"which would do nicely.  Or else the card would have Sadie and Mira on roller skates in Central Park, or riding a bicycle built for two, or taking in a Broadway show.

Instead, she'll have to settle for a pug eating a cake, or maybe a beagle with a party hat blowing out candles.

I might also have to buy Mira another dog book to add to her collection.  I just saw that there's an art book called The Artful Canine of dog paintings at the Met, so writing this post gave me some great gift ideas.

My favorite dog book is a memoir by Mark Doty called Dog Years.  It isn't funny, and it isn't cute, and it's the most moving and literary book I have read about what it means to adopt a pet and watch it become part of your family.  He takes us through several years of his life, including the days in New York just after 9/11, and we watch his two dogs, Arden and Beau, grow old, survive illnesses, and eventually die.  It's a beautiful, heartbreaking, groundbreaking book: meditative, philosophical, lyrical, smart, brave, and anything but sentimental.

In between his main chapters he has little italicized mini-essays he calls "entr'actse."  I am going to reproduce one of them,  "On Sentimentality," in entirety because I think it's insightful and scary-honest and provocative.

The oversweetened surface of the sentimental exists in order to protects its maker, as well as the audience, from anger.

 At the beautiful image refusing to hold, at the tenderness we bring to the objects of the world--our eagerness to love, make home, build connection, trust the other--how all of that's so readily swept away.  Sentimental images of children and of animals, sappy representations of love--they are fueled, in truth, by their opposites, by a terrible human rage that nothing stays.  The greeting card verse, the airbrushed rainbow, the sweet puppy face on the fleecy pink sweatshirt--these images do not honor the world as it is, in its complexity and individuality, but distort things in apparent service of a warm embrace.  They feel empty because they will not acknowledge the inherent anger that things are not as shown; the world, in their terms, is not a universe of individuals but a series of interchangeable instances of charm.  It is necessary to assert the insignificance of individuality to make mortality bearable.

 In this way, the sentimental represents a rage against individuality, the singular, the irreplaceable.  (Why don't you just get another dog?)

 The anger that lies beneath the sentimental accounts for its weird hollowness.  But it is, I suppose, easier to feel than what lies beneath rage: the terror of emptiness, of waste, of the absence of meaning or value; the empty space of our own death, neither comprehensible nor representable.  Not a grinning death's head but something worse: the lifeless blank, a zero no one steps around, though we try; repress it and it returns, more hungry, more negating, with more suck and pull.

 Despair, I think, is the fruit of a refusal to accept our mortal situation.  Perhaps it's less passive than it may seem; is despair a deep assertion of will?  The stubborn self saying, I will not have it, I do not accept it.

Fine, says the world, don't accept it.

The collective continues; the whole goes on, while each part slips away.  To attach, to attach passionately to the individual, which is always doomed to vanish--does that make one wise, or make one a fool?

When I read this for the first time, I swallowed hard.  I always assumed that what inspires generic cuteness and Hallmark smarminess is the same social conservatism that made Norman Rockwell paintings so popular: a fear of (or perhaps lack of training in appreciating) idiosyncratic images and original forms of expression.  In other words, sappiness and art are natural enemies.

But anger?  Rage?  Against individual mortality, including our own?  

The more I think about this, the more I think he nailed it.  The sensibility that goes for cheesy cutesy with all joking aside is one that wants to blot out pain and suffering and make everything airbrushed sweet.

I'm not sure how Mark Doty would characterize the dog humor cards my friends and sister and I send to one another.   We are generally making fun of ourselves for the excessive love we pour into our individual, irreplaceable dogs, but those cards are certainly excessively cute.

And now that my dog is fighting a grave illness and every occasion for a greeting card--a birthday, a holiday--is marked for me by the sadness that it might be the last time I get to spend that particular day of the year with her, these cards have an added poignancy for me.

My friend Rebecca's husband died suddenly in the fall of 2010, and she knows more about grief than anyone I spend time with these days.  After she read my post from yesterday she wrote:

"I think you have to be lighthearted in the face of such a serious situation. I joke about things Skip used to do all the time. It's not denial; it's a coping strategy. Equal measures of laughter and tears can be a great help when dealing with issues of life and death."

I will end again with Mark Doty's resonant ending to his short chapter:

To attach, to attach passionately to the individual, which is always doomed to vanish--does that make one wise, or make one a fool?

Is the humor in silly dog cards and pet trick videos a way of acknowledging that we, indeed, are fools for love?  And that we simply can't help it?  That to just surrender and be, as my husband likes to say with his slight English accent, "hopelessly besotted" with an individual dog, knowing I will lose her, knowing she will break my heart, knowing we are all going to lose loved ones and grieve: is this a form of masochism?  What drives this appetite and capacity for love that refuses to put on the brakes, even though sorrow is on its way too?

(She's a dog, not a person, someone somewhere is saying.  Yes, she's a dog.  And maybe that's part of what makes this love so tender.)

I know one thing for sure.  I used to not keep all of them, but every single dumb dog card I get from now on is going into my box of treasures.  They all make me smile, or snort, or guffaw, and I need that now more than ever.  A day might come in the future when I'll go to the box and look at them all again, including the valentine of the singing retriever pups from Sadie.  When I see them again, I'll cry.  But I'll be glad I have every last one of them.

photo by Tara Freeman

Day 72: On Resisting Sentimentality

Over the years my sister, my friends with dogs, and I have bought all the goofy dog cards our various stores have to offer.  I am waiting for the year when two of us end up exchanging the exact same card; it would inevitably be a picture of, say, a bulldog smoking a pipe, or a golden retriever with a green dog in its mouth with a caption that says "I love you," or a chihuahua in a Christmas stocking.  We aim for humor, not sentimentality, but we are also alerting one another that yes, we are the dog people, and we trade in cute dog shtick.  We accept that we are in this sub-culture.  It's a convenient way to speed up the search for the perfect greeting card.

I wrote in a fairly early post about how my husband objected to the bandannas Zoe's groomers gave her as a finishing touch.  I always thought she looked pretty, but I knew what he meant.  I think even in this picture, below, you can see that Zoe is a serious dog.  She isn't goofy, and she doesn't preen.  She's being anthropomorphized with this bow as some kind of girlie-girl.  But the other underlying issue was that my husband was afraid I might not stop there.  What if I started to pose with Zoe and her pink bow and turned these pictures into greeting cards?  And then before you know it I'd be dressing her up as an elf at Christmas.  From there we might work through other holidays.  The Easter Dog/Bunny?  The Halloween Dog Ghoul?  

(See Day 24: Zoe and Cindy: Meditation on the Quilt, for the story of how Zoe got all her bandannas that my husband had removed back in the form of a quilt, thanks to one of her favorite people.)

One year for my birthday Rebecca gave me a nightshirt with down-dogs all over it (that is, dogs doing down-dog pose from yoga) which I wore until it had holes in it, and then I found the catalog she'd ordered it from and bought its replacement.  My sister has given me countless pairs of dog socks as a joke, but then I wear them, usually when I'm walking Zoe or working out.  I've given her puppy calendars, or cute baby animal calendars, and she sends me You-tube films of dogs doing cute stuff, including dancing with their human partners.

If we do all this with a sense of humor, to indicate we are laughing mostly at ourselves and how over-the-top we are, do we still have a critical perspective, or did we cross the line the minute we bought our first card of a poodle with a hula hoop and a party hat? 

And what if the dog's person is helping her canine cutie battle a serious illness?  Is it wrong to continue buying the same kinds of cards?  Is it consoling to carry on in the same way?  Or is it a sign that I'm in denial?

The story continues tomorrow.

Day 71: The Flâneur and the Dog, Part Two

The flâneur--or in my case, flâneuse--wanders without a destination.  She is a passionate observer who delights in getting lost in the crowd.  She is easily distracted.  If this is a form of mindfulness, then the flâneur's aim is to fill his mind with his surroundings until he, as a self, as a mind, disappears. 

But what if you are far from the metropolis?

What if you are exploring not a foreign landscape but the one where you live?

What if there are very few people to absorb your meandering consciousness?

No intriguing signpost to remind you, at the meta-level, of your mission? 

No compelling graffiti or sticker art?

No arcades to poke your head into--no secret doorways with worlds beckoning just inside the window?

The St. Paul area in the Marais, Paris

This is the intriguing Butte de Chaumont area in Paris, the 13th arrondissement

To be a flâneur in the North Country is to be conspicuous.  The landscape is the crowd that absorbs you, but it is mostly not-human.  The squirrels take an interest in you.  The birds scatter.  The clouds become characters become Rorschach tests: is that a flag, a kilim rug, a dog's head, a minotaur, a minaret, a miming clown on a city street, or a storm coming in tonight? 

If anyone is awake in the vicinity, you will be noticed.  But you won't see them.  They'll be behind a window, looking out.  They will know if your dog is in a good mood today or not.  They will know if you tucked your pants into your boots, or if you pick up after your pet.  As a flâneur, you are witnessed more than you can witness, unless you take your time and try to see every little thing.

photo by Tara Freeman

But if a North Country flâneuse is in the right company, she can still lose herself completely.

photo by Tara Freeman

photo by Tara Freeman

photo by Tara Freeman

Day 70: The Flâneur and the Dog, Part One

When I taught in France we read a book I love by Edmund White called The Flâneur.  To be a flâneur is to be an ambler, or as Thoreau said, a saunterer.  Someone who strolls and wanders for hours without a fixed destination.  It was a word Baudelaire used and applied to someone who likes to explore the crowded city streets of Paris.  He wrote:

For the perfect flâneur, for the passionate observer, it's an immense pleasure to take up residence in multiplicity, in whatever is seething, moving, evanescent and infinite; you're not at home, but you feel at home everywhere; you see everyone, you're at the center of everything yet you remain hidden from everybody--these are just a few of of the minor pleasures of those independent, passionate, impartial minds whom language can only awkwardly define.  The observer is a prince who, wearing a disguise, takes pleasure everywhere . . . The amateur of life enters into the crowd as into an immense reservoir of electricity.

In Paris, Baudelaire especially loved the old arcades.  The twentieth century philosopher and essayist Walter Benjamin was writing his great tome to Baudelaire's flâneur and those arcades--what was to be published posthumously as The Arcade Projects--when the Nazis marched into Paris.

That aren't many of these arcades left.  Lizzy and I walked through one when she visited me in Paris a year ago.

My favorite thing to do in Paris, either alone or with a visiting friend, was to not make a plan.  We might decide that, at some point in the day, it might be nice to eat our picnic in a park, but that just gives us a general direction and until then, our backpacks aren't heavy and there's so much to see.

Now and then we might study a map, but then we had a destination, and we were no longer flâneurs.

The flâneur just goes where her feet lead her.  As a passionate observer, she loses herself completely.  She becomes part of the crowd.  She is just another point in the composition, the person in wine-colored boots sauntering beneath those gas lamps on gray cobblestones, another passionate observer among the crowd of people clumped near Notre-Dame watching the boy with the shaved head eat fire.  The flâneur is also that boy, and is also the fire.

When Zoe was in Paris with us, the question was, how does the crowd smell?  And is there meat?  And is there grass somewhere? 

When she pulled us with vigor, it wasn't always because there was something she just had to see like another dog in the next block.  Sometimes there was something she wanted to get away from--usually, a crowd, or the sound of something loud, like fireworks.

As a flâneur, Zoe prefers the sparsely populated path.  That's hard to find in Paris.

One day when Zoe was only a year old and her friend Cooper was maybe three, we walked with Cooper's person, Pat, on the path through the woods on the campus across from our house.

At the end of the walk, Pat asked me a trick question.   She said, "Did you notice anything unusual about today's walk?"

I thought about it.  We had marveled at the trillium.  And Cooper had coaxed Zoe into swimming further into the river than she ever had.  I mentioned those things.

"No," she said.  "We didn't pass another person in ninety minutes.  Not another living being.  That won't happen to you again until you come home from your trip."

I was about to leave for China, and I would be be gone for three weeks.  I would never not be in a crowd.

So the question is: can you be a flâneur without other people around? Without a crowd to absorb your individual identity?

The story continues tomorrow.

Day 69: A Valentine's Day Non-Date to Remember

My first date with my husband was on a Valentine's Day.  But he didn't know it was Valentine's Day, and neither of us thought of it as a date. 

I was new to the North Country, and he was newly single.  He had been widowed the previous summer, and although he wasn't officially ready, there were already a few women circling. 

I went to his house because we were colleagues and I assumed this was one of those invitations that old-timers extend to the newbies.  Another couple, Sid and Mo, had been invited as well, and they seemed not to be aware that it was Valentine's Day either.  I brought a bottle of my favorite French red wine.  Kerry would later tell our friend Eve that his days of buying box wine were coming to an end, and he had me to blame.   He served his signature dish, steak au poivre, but I was a vegetarian so I went home hungry that night.  We talked about students we had in common, our favorite books, and movies, and the evening rolled along pleasantly.  As a first date, it was not particularly romantic or auspicious, but as a non-date, it was a success.

And then something very strange happened, something completely uncanny and unexpected.  I was in the room we like to call, for lack of a better word, the wood stove room, getting ready to leave, when his boys came home.  I had walked to the house from my apartment, which was a mile away, but it was a cold night, and Sid and Mo were about to drive me back. The kids were 11 and 13.  The younger one had just been to a hockey game on our campus with his friends.  The older one had just gone on his very first babysitting gig.  I didn't take the ride, because I wanted to talk to these young whippersnappers.  And somehow, as the four of us stood chatting around the wood stove--standing because there was no furniture in the room, only the stove and bookshelves, standing also because I was on my way out and had my coat on, and they had just come in--I found myself glued to the floor.

I am not someone who stays late at someone's house on my very first visit.  I don't like to overstay my welcome, and I like to get up early to write.  But some kind of spooky gravity took over.  It's like my feet knew the score, and the rest of me knew squat.  Soon I was overheated--the coat, the stove--but I couldn't bring myself to leave.

Like me, the boys had no inkling that I was going to start dating their dad.  I was just one of his friends from work, and they were the children in a college town in which people of both genders and of all ages are always popping in and out for dinners and parties.  I don't remember what we all talked about, but if it was hockey, I would have had no prior experience to bring to the conversation.  I do know that by the time Kerry and I were officially seeing each other, the older boy seemed to think it was his idea.  Maybe he liked what I had to say about babysitting.

It took another three weeks and six days for us to realize that we liked each other and for us to set forth into the world on our first official dinner date.  (See Day 30: Two Weddings, A Book Launch, and a Funeral.) That was 21 years ago. 

Truth be told, neither of us is all that big on Valentine's Day.  He's suspicious of all commercial holidays, and my favorite holiday is Thanksgiving, especially since I've learned how to brine.  We do have a date tonight, but we're staying home.

We're having roast salmon, risotto with leeks and mushrooms, arugula, and the lemon tart with raspberries my husband made last night.  I bought the flowers.  Zoe will be stationed near us, hoping for bits of fish to fall.  And then we'll watch Downton Abbey on my laptop, which we never see on Sunday night because I can't stay up late enough.  (See Day 64 Hooked on Downton Abbey: In Love with Love.) I can't wait.

The thing about having a non-date or a real date at home with the person you are married to is, well, that you have to both enjoy being together at home.  This winter, more than ever, we both do.

It's so nice to set the table, put out the candles, the flowers, and open the non-box wine.  We hardly ever think about the years that have passed, and we don't speculate much about the future.  So instead, each date, or non-date, is just another evening.  We're in it for the food and the company. And we're sharing it with the dog.

When I retell the story here, my first dinner in this house sounds like a date with destiny.  But on that long-ago night, I had no glimmer that love was on its way, or the desire to have a family and settle down in one place, this house on the river.  But my feet knew what the rest of me didn't.  What they were saying was, this feels like peace.

Wishing you all a lovely Valentine's Day, gentle reader: dates, non-dates, and everything in between.

Day 68: Gentle Monday Mantra

When I first moved to the North Country to begin my job at the university, my friend Robin visited me from Alabama.  She was--and still is--a wonderful poet and writing professor, and although we're the same age, she had been teaching longer than I had.  She happened to be with me on the very first day I met my very first group of students.  I had been so excited and scared, I barely slept at all.

She took one look at my bloodshot eyes and electrocuted hair and said something that will always stay with me.

"Sometimes when I wake up, I just decide today is going to be a gentle day.  Especially if I haven't gotten enough sleep.  I try to move through the world in small steps.  I pay attention to small things around me.  I try not to rush even if I have a lot to do.  I'm gentle and patient with myself and with others.  Then everything seems to go better."

Looking back on this, I think she was talking about mindfulness. 

At Plum Village, Thich Nhat Hanh's community in France, every day is an opportunity to have a fresh start.  Every day is Monday:

Mindfulness is the energy of being aware and awake to the present moment. It is the continuous practice of touching life deeply in every moment of daily life. To be mindful is to be truly alive, present and at one with those around you and with what you are doing. We bring our body and mind into harmony while we wash the dishes, drive the car or take our morning shower. 

This fall my Mondays were full.  I would rise at 5:30 to meditate and write in my studio.  Zoe would wake up with me and assume her position on the balcony.  When she came inside to go back to the house for breakfast, I would hold onto this image of her outside, looking in.

Whenever I can, especially on a busy Monday, I try to take breaks to go outside, or go to a window, breathe slowly, look at the sky, and refresh my energy so that I won't be too tired later.
 

In writing class at 8 AM, we would start our day writing for ten minutes.  I brought my meditation timer and the sound of that gentle gong leading us in and out of the day's session helped me approach writing and teaching and being with other people with the same spirit of calm and peace that my dog and I shared in our pre-dawn communion.


If I had a different job, I think I would still try to do this.  I would arrive early at my office, bring a meditation gong (or program one on my computer), and sit quietly and write for the first ten minutes of my work day, just to clear my mind of clutter and prepare for the day ahead.

Teaching at 8 AM, grading, meetings, the gym, dog walk, office hours, then yoga class until 8 PM, dinner, reading until bedtime: the day was always rich with different kinds of activities, different groups of people, varied settings.  When I could, I brought my set of papers outside and entered the worlds my students had created while looking up now and then at the clouds skittering past, and the squirrels chasing each other at my feet.

I am lucky that I have to go outside and see the sky and feel the wind against my skin before I officially start my day.   Winter mornings really wake me up.

I try to bring the best part of the outside inside with me again. 

These winter mornings, I can devote most of my time to writing.  I am so grateful for this time.

I work long hours.  But I try to remember to bring some of the outside in, and the inside out, as a way to pace myself.

Have a gentle Monday, gentle readers. Namaste!